In Invisible Man, Brother Tarp and the shared the connection of “escaping” the south, Brother Tarp fled from a chain gang and the narrator who left college. After a conversation with the narrator, Brother Tarp gave the narrator metal from his ankle chain of the chain gang. Immediately after taking the metal, the narrator noted that it was like the link he had seen on Bledsoe’s desk, except Brother Tarp’s “bore the marks of haste and violence, looking as though it had been attacked and conquered before it stubbornly yielded”, while Bledsoe’s was smooth and intact.
Since around the 1890s (abolished in in every state by the 1950s), chain gangs took black prisoners and worked them brutally with forced labor. “For over 30 years, African-American prisoners... in the chain gangs were worked at gunpoint under whips and chains in a public spectacle of chattel slavery and torture.” Evidently, chain gangs represent pain, suffering, and torture; for Brother Tarp to carry around the chain says that despite the pain he had endured, the chain was a defining part of him. The broken chain represented his freedom and the fact that he has escaped the gang and overcome extremely tough times to partake in the movement of the Brotherhood. Although at the time he was still working towards the betterment of black people, Brother Tarp was freer than ever, and his broken chain signified how far he had come.
Opposite to Brother Tarp’s twisted broken chain, Bledsoe’s chain was perfectly intact. Bledsoe described the chain as a “‘symbol of our progress’”. Looking at Brother Tarp’s broken chain, a symbol of freedom and escape, it seemed as if Bledsoe’s chain symbolized the opposite. The perfectly kept chain symbolized restriction, as could be seen with Bledsoe’s character. Although Bledsoe believed that the white folks didn’t control the school because he was pretending to please them while actually undermining them, he was still essentially doing what the white people told him to do. By doing whatever white people told him to do, he was not actually free and was still basically in the hands of the white people, despite the fact that he believed that he was.
Unrelated (or maybe related?), there are also 2 other places in Invisible Man where Ellison mentions chain gangs. When the narrator took Norton to Golden Day, he saw the black veterans walking and described them as a “chain gang on its way to make a road. But chain gang marches single file and I saw no guards on horseback”. Also, when the narrator was in Harlem, he saw black men on the street who “hurried along with leather pouches strapped to their wrists”. He thought they “reminded me fleetingly of prisoners carrying their leg irons as they escaped from a chain gang.” I am still unsure exactly what these instances signify.
The men in the Golden Day were described as crazy and insane, even though they were able freely speak however they want (ex. the Vet). In this sense, they were free for freedom of speech, yet they were still chained down because their ideas and thoughts were dubbed illegitimate because they were crazy.
As for the men in Harlem, I thought that they were breaking the general stereotype of describing black men as being lazy and incompetent, because they seemed to be working men who were hurrying. Because of this, I think that the narrator viewed them as men escaping the chain gang because they were running away, or breaking free from the stereotypes.
There are so many different themes and motifs in Invisible Man, but this is one that I did not notice. I did not the repeated appearance of Brother Tarp's chain that he gave to the narrator, but I didn't make the connection between that and the other references to chain gangs throughout the novel that you pointed out. Though the vets are chained down in the sense that their thoughts are dismissed as crazy, I think in that chapter they are the most free out of the characters, up to that point because they can express their ideas freely, even if people ignore them, the truth behind their words (specifically the vets) still holds.
ReplyDeleteYou bring up an complex point in the differences between the two shackles we see examined in Invisible Man. Bledsoe's chain can certainly be seen as a restriction from an outsider's view, but I think he truly believes its a symbol of progress. If he's spent his entire life working his way up in the white world and finally considers himself to have "made it," he won't sacrifice his comfort to join the more systemic fight. The clean chain shows he acknowledges the history of African-Americans, but his present self is not doing the grunt work to affect how black people will be treated in the future.
ReplyDeleteGood eye, catching the chain-gang reference with the guys carrying briefcases handcuffed to their wrists. I wouldn't want to put too fine a point on it, but given that the narrator is optimistically striding through the financial district wishing he could one day be one of these guys, delivering important papers for important men, might be one more way that Ellison metaphorically undermines his sense of "progress." These messengers, rather than being symbols of northern "freedom," seem more like prisoners of a distinctly southern variety. Given the added symbolism of the briefcase in this novel, it's a loaded and revealing moment.
ReplyDeleteI think analyzing the differences between Bledsoe's chain and Brother Tarp's chain can help the reader gain a lot of insight about the differences between the characters. Bledsoe seems to be infinitely more interested in his own betterment and progress, his own power, while Brother Tarp seems to care about the progress of black people as a whole, and their increased role in society and their own lives. Bledsoe tells the narrator that he would have all black men killed if it meant maintaining his position of power--he does not care about the rights and discrimination of black men for he does not see himself as part of that category.
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